In Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, when unicast service is used, downlink (DL) media access control (MAC) transport blocks (TBs) are user equipment (UE) specific. That is, the data of a MAC TB is destined for only one UE. The physical (PHY) layer overhead associated with transferring a UE specific MAC TB includes, but is not limited to, a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) and a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) signaling/configuration, such as cell radio network temporary identities (C-RNTI), downlink control information (DCI) format, etc.
Complementary to the traditional unicast service, multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) supports multicast and broadcast services in cellular systems. With MBMS, the same content is transmitted to multiple users located in a specific area, an MBMS service area, which may include multiple cells.